Broadband take-up behind massive leap in BT profits

UK telecommunications infrastructure and service provider, BT, has attributed much of its recent increase in profits to the successful roll-out and take-up of its high speed broadband service.

The company has posted figures showing an incredible 71% increase in profits for the 2010-11 financial year, making a year-end pre-tax total of £1.7 billion.

According to Ian Livingston, BT’s chief executive, BT is now the ‘leading provider of broadband in the UK’.

BT has been involved in a deployment programme involving significant expansion of its fibre-optic broadband cable network across the UK.

Those households and businesses which have opted to connect to the resulting high speed broadband links have benefitted from much swifter and more effective access to large data transmissions.

Many businesses, meanwhile, have further benefitted from high speed broadband connections by using the facility to gain access to business VoIP (voice over internet protocol’). This is because business VoIP provides firms with the opportunity to save on the cost of phone calls and to simplify the administration of their business phone systems.

The take-up of internet protocol (IP) telephony and other VoIP services by businesses has increased significantly over the past few years as a result of these cost and administrative benefits.

Yet, whether a business chooses to install its own VoIP system; adapt its existing phone system to send and receive VoIP calls by way of session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking; or to completely rely on the remote hosted services of a business VoIP provider or VoIP reseller; none of these options can be taken up without access to a reliable internet connection.

Fortunately, as Livingston explains, BT is currently engaged in ‘one of the most rapid’ expansions of high speed broadband ever seen, increasing its reach by 80,000 potential households or businesses each week.